


Placebo

by Sab



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Short, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-01
Updated: 2009-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He killed 'em. All of 'em.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Placebo

**Author's Note:**

> For Kate, who asked for Ten and Martha post-"Gridlock"

Her first reaction after he tells her -- and she curses herself for it but there it is -- is that she’s traveling through space with a genocidal maniac, and she casts about for something to arm herself with.

“I’m not going to kill you,” says the Doctor, looking regretful and not a little wounded.

“I know that,” she says. “I mean, I think I do.”

She takes his hand, but over in the corner she’s got her eye on a big piece of torn-off bumper that could double as a bludgeon in a pinch.

“I was gonna say, I don’t know anything about you,” she says. “But it’s not true. I know more about you than I did.”

“You know more about me than any living creature,” the Doctor says.

“Save you.”

The Doctor looks away. “So!” he leaps to his feet. “To space and time we go?”

“Not yet,” says Martha, but she stands. What she knows about him is that he’s angry, terribly angry and almost as lonely. That Rose was a palliative but not a cure, and that she, Martha, didn’t sign on as his doctor to heal his lonely soul. Goddamned broken men, always ruin the best girls, Martha thinks. None of us can resist the urge to fix ‘em.

New New York is ripe around them, the heavy smell of exhaust fumes mingling with rotting fruit and flesh, but Martha’s not ready to leave yet.

“Admit that you’re damaged,” she says. “It’s the first step toward getting well.”

The Doctor chuckles. “Oh, there’s no doubt whatsoever as to whether I am damaged, but I sincerely doubt there’s much chance of getting well from what it is ails me.”

Martha lays a hand on his shoulder, but he’s still looking away. “I did a psych rotation,” she says. “I know about post traumatic stress, depression disorders --“

“Don’t.” The Doctor holds up a hand, and his eyes are so cold and so terrifying that Martha wants to run somewhere and hide. “Just…don’t.”

She closes her mouth.

“Sorry,” says the Doctor. “That enough of that, then? Off we go? Space and time?”

“Off we go,” says Martha, following him into the TARDIS. “Space and time.”

They don’t talk for much of the trip, but somewhere between the Cowan Nebula and Planet Zigmagorax Martha can’t keep quiet any longer.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to psychoanalyze you.”

“That’s just exactly what you meant to do, but, no matter, it’s behind us.”

“Man, you’re evasive,” says Martha.

“It’s one of my finer traits,” the Doctor says. “Got where I am by being evasive. Evading criminals, evading catastrophe, evading death -- and sometimes narrowly, I might add.”

She just glowers.

“Look,” he says. “I may look human, but you have got to understand how profoundly I am _not_.”

“Even aliens get lonely,” she says. “I’ve met a few who even tried to feel me up at parties, so don’t try that on me.”

The Doctor grins. A big grin, and it almost scares her more than the cold eyes had. “Martha Jones,” he says. “Doctor Martha Jones, who won’t quit until she gets her diagnosis. I love it!”

She smiles despite herself, nervous.

The Doctor steps forward and takes both her shoulders, hard enough to shake her off her feet a little. “Martha Jones!” he says again. And then he’s kissing her, and it’s like nothing she’s ever experienced in her life, hungry and electric and so much more than that first genetic transfer could have ever prepared her for, when he took an untried medical student in the hospital corridor and trusted her to save mankind.

She draws her arms around him and he’s narrow and strong and she pulls him close and kisses him more, and again, and again.

And even as she’s doing it she knows she’s just another palliative, but damn it she doesn’t _care_, because the Doctor is kissing her like he means it, and for now, she’s going to believe he does.


End file.
